MONTREAL — She campaigned on a promise to rid the public sector of employees wearing hijabs, but in the end it was Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois who was shown the door by voters Monday — and with a slam.

MONTREAL – Genevieve Caron does not believe that the Quebec government is going far enough with its proposed charter of values. She and her husband, Claude Pinault, testified in a personal capacity at the province’s public hearings into the charter on Thursday.

Has it come to this? Municipal employees in upscale Hampstead, in Montreal, have never been known to wear their religious beliefs on their sleeves. But Mayor William Steinberg tells the Montreal Gazette that some want to start sporting banned religious symbols if Bill 60, Quebec’s odious charter of “state secularism,” becomes law.

Women’s groups are reporting a spike in verbal and physical assaults against veiled Muslim women in Quebec since the introduction of the province’s Charter of Values, evidence that the Parti Québécois’s bid to curb religious symbols in some workplaces is inflaming social tensions.

Woman alleges she and family were verbally assaulted and spit on while shopping. A Muslim woman says she and her family were verbally assaulted, her son was spit on and they were told to “change your religion” while on a recent trip at a Quebec City shopping centre.

Quebec has the second largest Muslim population in Canada. The census bureau says about 200,000 Muslims live in Quebec. It is perhaps the fastest growing religion in Canada and is expected to triple within the next 20 years, but critics say with all of its diversity, Quebec is also perhaps one of the most Islamaphobic provinces in the country.